Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories

by Various

  From time to time, though, properly-painted puppets from the heart of the City wandered through. The nice ones came to buy old, broken-down things to mend—chairs with wobbly legs, flutes that were missing a few notes, or picture frames that didn’t hang straight. The others, who weren’t so nice, came for the smell of the fog. They walked around the market in groups, making jokes with one another and staring at everyone. Some of these puppets pointed at Still and laughed, but there were always a few who would give her licorice or even some chocolate if she would pretend to play for them. A few even asked her to come back with them and give them a private concert, but Still looked at their bright, shiny eyes and shook her head.

  As the weeks went by, Still got to know a few of the other puppets who lived in the fog. She told them that she had been stolen from a far-away villages by lions, and sold to pirates who had brought her across the sea to work as a slave in the glue mines. “How did you escape?” they asked. “Oh, that’s a secret,” she said. “If I tell you, you might tell them, and then if I’m ever caught again, I won’t be able to get away.” They didn’t believe her, and she knew they didn’t, but they pretended right along with her, just as she pretended to believe that the one-armed puppet who pasted leaves on the trees had once been a princess, or that the twins who boiled scraps of canvas in an old black kettle to get the oil out were really magicians in disguise.

  From time to time, though, Still heard Elbow’s or Ramble’s voice, very faintly, calling her name. Whenever that happened, she whispered, “You don’t belong here anymore,” and hid herself until the voices went away.

  And once, just once, she saw a puppet she almost recognized. His clothes were blue and orange, and he wore a polka-dot hat. He had black curls painted on his forehead, and a warm smile painted on his face. He was with a crowd of other puppets, all of them so painted and polished that they looked brand new. As she watched him, he pointed at the little cans of fish scales that one tired old puppet was trying to sell and laughed, “Ah hoo hoo hoo . . . Ah hee hee hee . . .”

  Still hid behind a pile of old dreams until the puppet was gone. When she finally ventured out again, she played her silent music faster and more furiously than she ever had before. Her arm practically whirred as it flew back and forth. No one gave her any candy that day, and even a few of the puppets in the market’s stalls muttered about her under their breath.

  And so the days passed, each colder than the one before, until one morning Still woke up to find a faint dusting of snow on the dirty streets around her. She wrapped her violin in newspaper, then climbed up a drainpipe so that she could tuck it under the eaves of a warehouse whose windows had been boarded up. She walked the long way around to the market, just so that she could see how the snow made the city look. She played all day, but only a few puppets went past, and none put any candy in her paper box.

  As the sun began set, Still trudged back down into the fog, circling the block once to make sure that no-one was following her before climbing up the drainpipe to get her violin.

  It was gone.

  Still felt around under the eaves. It wasn’t there. She leaned out as far as she could so that she could grope around the next section. It wasn’t there either.

  Panic grated in her gears like sand. The dent on her cheek seemed to throb. Where was her violin? Where had it gone?

  Still was just about to start whimpering when a grating voice above her said, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Still was so startled that she almost fell off the drainpipe. She looked up. The voice had come from a beaky gray head that sat atop a short, barrel-shaped body. The figure had long arms, and wings folded up against its back. It was a gargoyle!

  “Some crows saw you hide it this morning,” the gargoyle said in a voice that sounded like bricks being scraped together. “You know what they’re like for taking things, so I thought I had better keep it safe for you.”

  “May I—may I have it back?” Still asked. She felt as though her mainspring was about to snap.

  “Of course,” the gargoyle said. It handed the violin back to her. Still snatched it from him and hugged it close.

  “Will you play it for me?” the gargoyle asked. “It’s been a long time since I heard any music.”

  “I—I don’t play it any more,” Still said. “But if you’d like to come down to the street, I can give you some of my gumdrops. For keeping the violin safe,” she added, seeing the gargoyle’s frown.

  The gargoyle shook its head. “No thank you,” it said. “Even if I could come down to the street, I don’t have much use for candy.” It shrugged its wings.

  “Why can’t you come down?” Still asked. “Are you guarding the building?”

  The gargoyle’s voice scraped, skrrk skrrk skrrk. It took Still a moment to realize that it was laughing. “No,” it finally said. “I can’t come down because I can’t. Look!” It pointed at its legs. Still gasped. They were carved out of the same stone as the building. The top half of the gargoyle was alive, but the bottom half was part of the building.

  “I was made this way so that I would always be on guard,” the gargoyle told her. “That’s why I’m called a ‘guard goyle.’ And for years and years, that’s what I did. But then everyone stopped coming, and the shops all closed, and only the fog and I were left.”

  Some little piece of machinery inside Still ticked over for the first time in a very long time. “Well, if you’re not going anywhere,” she said shakily, “And if you don’t have anything else in particular to do, would you mind looking after this for me sometimes? Because I keep worrying, every time I hide it, that someone might find it and take it away, and I—I just don’t think I could bear that.” Slowly, very slowly, she held out her violin.

  And so Still and the gargoyle became—friends? Perhaps. He told her stories about what the streets had been like years ago, when all the lanterns were lit and puppets on stilts swished back and forth waving signs for different shops. He told her about hearing cheers the first time puppets had gone to the moon and back in a balloon, and about the weeping when the city had woken to discover that Key the Cutter was gone.

  That was when Still realized just how old the gargoyle was. “Don’t you ever wish you could see the rest of the world?” she asked one evening. She was sitting beside him on the roof, kicking her feet gently against the icicles that hung down from the eaves. Every once in a while she would kick a little too hard, and an icicle would fall to the street below and go tink like a little bell.

  The gargoyle was quiet for so long that Still thought it had fallen asleep. But then it rustled its stony wings. “Don’t you?” it replied.

  “Oh, I’ve already seen it,” she said. “I grew up far, far away, in a village on the edge of the desert. When I was little, I was stolen by lions. They sold me to pirates, and they put me to work in the glue mines. It took me years to escape.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever escape from here?” the gargoyle asked.

  Still opened her mouth, then closed it. “I don’t know how,” she finally whispered. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Well, what would Key have done?” the gargoyle said. “Key the Great, Key the Cutter, Key who snipped strings and walked where she wanted to, and then showed other puppets how to do the same. What would she have done?”

  “I don’t know,” Still said with a shrug.

  “Well, why don’t you ask her?”

  Still forced a laugh. “Ask her? But she’s been gone for ages! She must be sawdust by now.”

  The gargoyle shook his head. “Not Key,” it said. “As long as there are puppets in the world, there’ll be a Key to help them cut their strings.”

  “But I don’t have any strings,” Still protested. She waved her arms. “See?”

  “Sometimes the strings are inside,” the gargoyle said. It reached out a long arm to touch the dent on Still’s face. She jerked her head back. “See?” the gargoyle said. “Something pulled you away. And something
keeps you from playing your violin, even though you look at it every morning the way a squeaky puppet looks at oil.”

  They spoke no more that night.

  The next morning, though, Still decided that she would get the gargoyle a scarf as a present. The midwinter eclipse was coming up, when families gave each other gifts (had she ever done that?). “He probably hasn’t had a present in years,” she thought. “Maybe never.” She had saved up half-a-dozen gumdrops and a big piece of licorice. Another couple of gumdrops and a few sugar sprinkles in change, and she’d be able to get him a scarf that would reach right down to the ground.

  But Still knew that gumdrops would be hard to come by in the market now that winter had arrived. If she wanted to earn that kind of candy, she would have to go higher up in the City, up where the puppets’ shoes matched and their stitching was done with silk thread. Up where—where— She shook her head so hard that the thought fell out and rolled away.

  Still walked until she came to a tidy little street full of tidy little shops, then chose a corner where puppets were getting on and off bright red streetcars. She found a newspaper on a bench that was so fresh, the ink still smelled faintly of cinnamon. She folded the comics page into a neat little box and set it at her feet, then bent her head and began to play. The fingers of her left hand fluttered in the air, sliding up and down on strings that weren’t there. Her right arm was as graceful as the neck of a swan. Even though she wasn’t making a sound, she was playing as beautifully as she ever had.

  Which is why she was so surprised when an old puppet with frizzy white hair sniffed, “I never!” as he walked by. “Out here in the street like that!” he said to the puppet walking beside him.

  “It’s shameful!” the other puppet agreed.

  Still kept playing. Some other well-dressed puppets sniffed at her as well, but a few dropped sugar sprinkles into her box. Just before lunch time, a strawberry gumdrop went plonk into the box. Still kept playing. As the shadows grew longer, the sugar sprinkles began to pile up. Finally, just as the shopkeepers were taking in their sandwich signs, a tired-looking puppet wearing a turban and big black boots tossed another gumdrop into her box as he strode by. She had enough to buy the gargoyle a scarf!

  Still scooped up her box and turned. And froze. And ducked into the doorway of the shop behind her. She pretended to read the sign—Microscopes and Tweezers, All Kinds, Finest Workmanship Only—until the reflections of a handful of puppets went by. Most were her age, but one was older. His clothes were blue and orange, and he wore a polka-dot hat. He had black curls painted on his forehead, and a big smile painted on his face.

  The younger puppets all had instruments tucked under their arms: flutes, trumpets, glockenspiels, and midget tubas. Still recognized some of them from—from—

  “You’re all playing quite nicely,” she heard the older puppet say warmly. “Especially you, Mustard.” He put his hand on one puppet’s shoulder and gave her a friendly squeeze. “I think you’re just about ready for some special lessons.”

  “Thank you, Mister Leaf,” the young puppet said, “But I don’t know if my parents can— I mean—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” the older puppet said. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  The streetcar arrived with a rattle. The puppets got on. Still waited until she stopped shaking, then walked slowly back into the fog.

  She was so quiet that evening that the gargoyle finally said, “Are you angry with me for what I said about strings?”

  “What? Oh, no, I’m not angry,” Still replied. She shook her head. Her thoughts rattled around for a moment, but were just as jumbled when they came to rest as they had been before. “I just heard something today . . .”

  “Something bad?” the gargoyle asked.

  Still nodded. “Something horrible,” she said. She hugged her legs to her chest and put her chin on her knees. “What would you do if you knew someone was going to do something awful—something really, really awful?”

  The gargoyle shrugged his stony shoulders. “I’d whistle as loud as I could until the police came,” he said. “Then I’d tell them everything I knew.”

  Still raised her hand to her face. The edges of the dent in her cheek had worn smooth, as had the other nicks and scratches that life on the foggy streets had given her. “But what if they’d put strings on you if you told?” she whispered. “What if they’d screw eyehooks into your elbows and knees, and run black silk strings through them, so that you could never move your own arms and legs again?”

  “I’d do it anyway,” the gargoyle said. “If you let something bad happen, that’s almost the same as doing it yourself.” He shrugged his stony shoulders once again. “But you have to remember, I’m not a puppet, I’m a gargoyle. Maybe the last steadfast gargoyle left in Key’s City. If I—”

  “Key . . .” Still whispered. The whirling thoughts in her head fell into place, clunk clunk clunk, like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. “She’d know what to do!” She leapt to her feet. “And you said she was still here, didn’t you? Oh, where can I find her? Please, please, tell me!”

  The gargoyle looked at her with love and sadness in his stony old eyes. “I can’t tell you how to find her,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have to figure it out for yourself.” The gargoyle held her violin out to her. “Here. Follow this, wherever it leads. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Still snatched her violin away from him. It had a few nicks and scratches too, from the places it had been hidden, and her thumb could feel a faint groove from—from— She shook her head angrily. She had just managed to get all her thoughts to fit together—she was not going to shake them up again, not when something so important needed to be done.

  “But how can I follow a violin?” Still asked. “It can’t float through the air like a balloon, or run like a clock. What am I supposed to do?”

  The gargoyle just bowed his head. Still begged and wheedled, she blustered and raged, but the gargoyle wouldn’t say a word.

  “Fine!” Still shouted. “Be like that! I thought you were my friend, but you’re really just a horrible old piece of stone. You don’t care at all!” She spun around, grabbed the drainpipe, and slithered down to the street. Little drops of oil welled up in her eyes as she ran through the street, down, down, deeper into the fog than she had ever gone before.

  She ran and ran past the grimy walls and bent-over lampposts. Suddenly she slipped on a dirty patch of refrozen snow. Her violin flew from her hand and tumbled end over end through the air. “Noooo!” Still shrieked as it vanished over a low brick wall. She heard a faint kersplash.

  Still scrambled to her feet and chinned herself up on the wall. Two stories below lay a canal full of cold, dark water. Her violin bobbed gently up and down in its middle. Even as she watched, the current was pulling it away.

  Still gulped. She would float too—after all, she was made of wood. But how would she get out? There were no ladders on the side of the canal, no docks or stairways that she could see. And it was getting dark . . .

  She pulled herself up onto the wall. It was only half as wide as a sidewalk, and splashed here and there with treacherous patches of ice, but she walked as quickly as she could, glancing down every few moments to keep her violin in sight.

  She was trying so hard not to lose sight of her violin, and not to slip on the ice, that she was almost on top of the stairway before she noticed it. The steps were worn and icy, but she clattered down them two at a time. At the bottom, they turned into a narrow footpath running along the canal’s edge. There was ice here too, and frozen slime, and some of the stones were loose. And it was dark, even with the moon coming up—so dark that she wondered if the tiny patch of stillness in the middle of the canal was really her violin, or just her imagination.

  Up ahead, Still could hear an echoing, gurgling sound. “Now what?” she wondered wearily. The answer turned out to be a round-roofed tunnel big enough to swallow a coal
barge, its mouth covered with a heavy iron grill.

  Still gasped in despair as the current swept her violin between its bars. They were too close together—she could reach an arm through, but couldn’t squeeze past them. And her violin was disappearing into the darkness!

  Still looked around wildly. There wasn’t a gate. There wasn’t an alarm bell for her to ring, or any sign of a secret door. There was just the pale moon above her, the blank walls of the canal, and the broken stones of the narrow path beneath her feet.

  The stones! She bent over and picked one up, staggered to the edge of the canal, and jumped in.

  Without the stone, she would have bobbed up and down like a cork. With it in her arms, she sank straight down into the cold, dark, dirty water. She squeezed her eyes shut so tightly that little bright patterns of light danced on the backs of her eyelids. The oil in her joints felt like it was freezing solid. She could end like this, she realized. She could be snagged on some thrown-away piece of machinery under the water, and trapped in the darkness until her clockwork rusted solid and she ended, and no one would ever know.

  Still hung on just a moment longer than she could bear, then let go of the stone. Whoosh! She shot up like a clown fired out of a circus cannon.

  “Pfaaah!” she spluttered as her head broke through the surface. She looked around wildly. There was the grill—and there was the sky, on the other side of it! She’d done it! The current had swept her beneath the grill!

  That same current was still carrying deeper beneath the city. Misshapen patches of fungus glowed the roof of the tunnel like moonlit clouds. A side tunnel led away from the one Still was in. She couldn’t see her violin any longer. There was no way to tell where the current had taken it.

  “I can’t just stay here,” she fretted. “What should I do?”